"Florida has become The Joke State, the state everybody makes fun of. If states were characters on Seinfeld, Florida would be Kramer: Every time it appears, the audience automatically laughs, knowing it's going to do some idiot thing."

We've all seen the headlines: Florida Man [Does Something Bizarre]. Of late, the state has become a bit of a joke according to Dave Barry, the Pulitzer Prize-winning humorist who's lived in Florida for decades, so he feels he needs to defend his adopted home. In this lighthearted examination of the Sunshine State, he travels to an assortment of typically Florida places that aren't as well known as Disney World, including Gatorland (reptiles!), Cassadaga (psychics!), and Weeki Wachee Springs (mermaids!), offering informative yet funny insights into Florida as a place of history and fun. Our headline? Proud Florida Man Writes Hilarious Book.

If you're a 20-something working and living in New York City, you're living the dream -- right? Not if you're Jennifer Baggett, Holly Corbett, or Amanda Pressner. The trio of friends -- wondering if the paths they were on were the right ones -- left their apartments, jobs, and boyfriends to embark on a year-long adventure around the world, visiting more than ten countries on four continents, including Peru, Vietnam, India, and Australia. Though there are difficulties (could you hang out with your two besties for a year without getting on each other's nerves?), there are also a lot of amazing experiences, such as traveling down the Amazon and volunteering at a girls' orphanage in Kenya.

This isn't your typical travelogue. Until I Say Good-Bye unsentimentally chronicles the final year of a 45-year-old journalist and mother with ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease, an irreversible condition that progressively destroys nerves that control muscles. Once she was diagnosed, it wasn't long before Spencer-Wendel decided to quit her job (though she loved it) and use some of her remaining days traveling to such places as the Yukon, Hungary, the Bahamas, and Cyprus with friends and family, including individual trips with each of her three children. Readers joining her on her poignant, powerful journey will be inspired to find joy in their own situations.

In Without Reservations, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Alice Steinbach chronicled taking a leave of absence from the Baltimore Sun to travel and learn about herself. Several years later, she completely quit her job and set off again. In Educating Alice, she enrolls in a French cooking class in Paris, attends border collie training in Scotland, learns traditional Japanese arts in Kyoto, studies art and architecture in Havana, and more, while meeting a wide range of interesting people along the way. With vividly depicted settings and keen observations and insights, this memoir is a charming delight.

Jim Ziolkowski had a fast-track corporate finance job at the age of 24 -- but, moved by the extreme poverty he'd seen while traveling in India, Thailand, and Nepal, he quit in order to start a non-profit service-oriented program, buildOn, addressing global illiteracy and the problems of inner-city American youth. Even though Ziolkowski had no professional experience in education or fundraising, he had faith, and buildOn became a life-changing success, with over 550 schools built 20 years later. But it wasn't easy: Ziolkowski has had guns pointed at him in South Africa and Harlem, been bitten by poisonous snakes in Africa and South America, and suffered from malaria and dysentery (on four different continents!).